A silent killer who gouges out his victims’ eyes stalks a group of young criminals sentenced to clean up an abandoned hotel.

Synopsis:

Police officer Frank Williams and his rookie partner enter an abandoned building littered with religious iconography to rescue a restrained woman whose eyes are gouged out. Jacob Goodnight, a silent serial killer who removes his victims’ eyes, uses an axe to cut off Williams’ hand and to kill the other officer before Williams fires a shot into Jacob’s head.

4 Years Later – Now fitted with a prosthetic hand, Williams works as a guard at the County Detention Center. He and Hannah Anders supervise a work program for eight incarcerated delinquents. The four young men are Russell Wolf, Richie Bernson, Michael Montross, and Tyson Simms. The four young women are Christine Zarate, Zoe Warner, Kira Vanning, and Melissa Beudroux.

The group is taken to the abandoned Blackwell Hotel where they are met by caretaker Margaret Kane. The young men and women are assigned to spend three days cleaning up the derelict building so that it can be turned into a homeless shelter.

At night, Richie convinces Tyson to help him search the labyrinthine halls for a safe rumored to have been left behind following a fire. Christine consoles Kira after an encounter with her ex Michael. The other four meet up to explore the building on their own.

Richie and Tyson discover a dead body with its eyes missing shortly before Jacob appears and captures Richie. Richie is later killed when Jacob gouges out his eyes. Hannah goes to investigate the commotion and is killed in the elevator.

Kira tries escaping the hotel, but is taken prisoner by Jacob. Williams, Margaret, and Christine hear Kira struggling, but are unable to rescue her in time. Williams and Christine then discover the grisly scene in the elevator before reuniting with Tyson. Williams realizes that they are dealing with the same madman he faced four years earlier, and that the cross tattoos on potential victims’ bodies are what prevents Jacob from killing. Jacob then reappears and kills Williams with a hook.

Russell and Melissa separate from Michael and Zoe for some privacy. As they make out, Jacob bursts through a two-way mirror and attacks. Russell is killed while Melissa falls to the courtyard where she is eaten alive by a pack of stray dogs.

Jacob next kills Zoe by shoving a cell phone down her throat. Jacob then uses the safe that Richie was searching for to crush Tyson.

Margaret reveals to the captive Kira that she is actually Jacob’s mother. Deluded by her beliefs, Margaret raised her son through a history of religious abuse to become a killer of sinners and whores in God’s name. Williams was lured purposefully to the hotel so that Margaret could have revenge on him for shooting Jacob. When she tries forcing Jacob to finally murder Kira, Jacob ends up throwing Margaret into a wall where her head is impaled on an exposed spike.

Christine attempts to rescue Kira from Jacob’s clutches. Michael joins the struggle and the three survivors are ultimately able to send Jacob through a window after Christine shoves a pipe into his eye socket. Jacob falls to the ground below and seemingly dies when his heart ruptures. In an epilogue scene, a stray dog happens by and urinates into Jacob’s empty eye socket.

Review:

After an opening credits montage of dirty cages, creepy dolls, and crawling cockroaches, two police officers cautiously stalk a dilapidated building with their guns drawn and their flashlights pointed. “Shouldn’t we wait for backup?” wonders one cop. “You wait!” replies the other. Noting the hallway of horrors they’ve entered with bloody handprints on the walls, the shocked officer asks, “are you checking this out?” A crucifix sways in silhouette. An eerie children’s choir sings on the record player in the background. All the classic cues pulled from page one of The Beginner’s Guide to Basic Slasher Moviemaking are represented in one form or another. It’s a conventional opening to a conventional film.

The scene plays out. The title cards finish. Flash forward to four years later. The passage of time is illustrated by the surviving cop, now missing one hand, having gone nearly bald in the interim. He currently works as a guard supervising incarcerated delinquents on a coed work program to clean up a derelict hotel aiming to reopen as a homeless shelter. Because what can go wrong when you mix eight aspiring young criminals of both genders inside a maze-like old building with only two chaperones?

The ladies’ side of the aisle is occupied by a granola-eating good girl, nose-pierced punker with a pretty pout, rich bitch blonde, and wife-beater-wearing ethnic tough girl. The young men consist of a buffoonish bad boy, wannabe suave Latino, rugby-shirted dork, and token black guy.

To lend their stereotypes some style, the characters are introduced with weird freeze-frame mugshots and rap sheet nameplates. To demonstrate their personalities, they deliver dialogue like, “I heard Chihuahua attack” as a speculative insult for their injured supervisor’s amputation. Everyone snickers, since this is evidently the kind of witty quip that cracks up fearsome felons in training.

You’ll notice I have not yet summarized the actual plot of “See No Evil”. But if you were to guess serial stalker starts offing the young crooks one at a time, I would counter by asking, “what took you so long?”

As the mysterious madman, seven-foot-tall WWE superstar Glenn “Kane” Jacobs has an unquestionably commanding presence of imposition. Although without makeup, a mask, or a distinctive costume, his Leatherface/Myers/Krueger/Voorhees fill-in is basically a big mute brute. Kane is as good as he needs to be for a role requiring only a stuntman to swing heavy objects and utter two lines, one of which is just a single word.

So why a mixed rating for a mostly derivative movie? The question comes down to who “See No Evil” is made for. It’s not a palate pleaser for horror aficionados seasoned on all things slasher. Unless hard up for fresh paint on an old premise, there’s no reason to rent a room here when one can find friendlier accommodations in any of the contemporary chillers it draws/steals inspiration from.

No, this is a movie made for a less-discerning audience of teens and twentysomethings who maybe see one such killer thriller a year, if that many. “See No Evil” is a product of its 2006 release year, when Platinum Dunes was cresting its peak of polarizing audiences with remakes and prequels for “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “The Amityville Horror,” and “The Hitcher.” Lump in the “Hills Have Eyes” redux, and you’re talking about a time when the focus was not on impressing genre fans, but on dazzling budding young hipsters with slick visuals, comely casts, and popcorn fare for a Friday night midnight movie.

Like it or not, and all is forgiven for falling into that latter category, “See No Evil” hurdles this low bar it sets for itself. Some creativity with the kills, like the silly shoving of a cell phone down one person’s throat, offers a side of gallows charm to the splattery gore. But right down to the lowbrow epilogue and attitudinal hip-hop song accompanying the end credits, this is a film with intentionally limited goals for its appeal. And it meets all of them.

Movies such as “See No Evil” are like a candy bar for the health conscious. Have one infrequently and the creamy nougat of horror tropes and caramel coating of senselessly slaughtered coeds go down smooth and tasty as a guilty pleasure. Gorge yourself on this sort of junk food regularly and you’ll only make yourself sick, bloated, and aching for a nap.